Social Media Marketing Impact & Spend, February 2015 [CHART]

The survey also reveals that CMOs are bullish on mobile budgets, forecasting them to rise to 9% share of marketing budgets in the next 3 years, up from 3.2% this year. Even so, mobile trails social distantly as a budget item in CMOs’ minds: currently capturing 9.9% of marketing budgets, CMOs see social comprising 13.5% of budgets next year and 22.4% in the next 5 years. Social’s budget influence ought to be strongest among B2C services companies, per the study, with these respondents estimating that social will occupy a hefty 27.7% of their budgets in the next 5 years.

All of that spending comes despite a lack of social media integration with marketing strategy: fewer than 1 in 5 CMOs rated social’s integration a top-2 box score on a 7-point scale. (And B2C services companies were the least likely to do so, at just 12%.)

Moreover, spending on social media continues to look up even as CMOs still struggle to prove its impact. Fully 45% of CMOs reported being unable to show yet the impact that social media has on their business. And the vast majority of the remainder only have a qualitative rather than quantitative sense of its impact. In fact, just 13.2% of respondents overall say they have proven social’s impact quantitatively. This has been a persistent issue for years now, and shows no signs of abating. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.